Picture of the Moment—Point of Impact

I grew up in Kingsville, Texas, (Gulf Coast) and spent a lot of time surfing on South Padre Island National Seashore during high school. I have lived here in San Diego since April 1993. I have been able to spend a lot of time watching pelicans and taking their pictures.

I have a few billion pictures of them flying through the air with the greatest of ease. Until this past weekend in Santa Cruz, California, I had never seen a pelican fishing. Usually they just sit around on shore, or a pier, or a fishing site, waiting for scraps from fisherpeople. One can often see crowds of them following a fishing boat returning from the Pacific Ocean.

In Santa Cruz, they weren’t waiting around for anything. They were doing their own fishing, and I caught one of them at the end of his dive, at the point of impact with the water. Click on the picture below and you can see very clearly the fish that Mr. Pelican had his eye on.

When you are in edit mode and insert a photo, there are fields that specify what the photo links to. If you miss it when you insert it, click on it again and click on the pencil icon on the pop-up menu (edit). Another menu opens and near the top there’s the box that specifies what the photo links to. The choices are the source file, nothing, or a custom link.

I’m betting right now it’s set to nothing.

WordPress remembers the field as set when you first insert a photo (the insert media menu, lower right). If it’s set to nothing, all subsequent photos will be set to nothing. If set to the source file, all subsequent photos will default to that.

Yep. That’s what I’ve been doing for 6 years now, but sometimes WordPress just doesn’t cooperate. As my wise old grandmother told me in 1966: “The great thing about WordPress is that it’s open source. That worst thing about WordPress is that it’s open source.” Various upgrades and contributions usually aren’t tested as well as they might be.

That’s odd because I’m doing it right now and it’s working fine (I’m writing a “how to” post).

I’m on a PC, so if you are on an Apple product, there might be a difference on how it works, but otherwise, the program should work exactly the same. I mean, I don’t think that when I call up the WordPress site I get a different version than other people. I suppose it could be, but that would be crazy.

It’s only odd if one doesn’t have a lot of experience with WordPress. I’ve been using WordPress since 2007, and posting an average of one post per day since January 7, 2012. This is not the first oddity that WordPress has thrown at me. I usually leave comments over at the WordPress forums. Rarely get replies but eventually the problem does get fixed.

And I wasn’t even using burst mode, which is how people normally capture such photos. If I had been using burst mode, I would have a lot of pictures of the pelican diving which I then could make into a cool GIF.

I kid, but I’ve done a fair amount of posting myself (my own claim to authority and adding in some personal anecdotal evidence). WordPress does occasionally mess up stuff, but that messing up involves changing things so that users can’t figure out where stuff is.

There have been very few times when stuff didn’t work because of a glitch at WordPress and then it’s universal to all users and you hear it across the board (along with an apology from WordPress).

A lot of what I’m hearing lately seems to me more like user error. Then again, I could be wrong (user error).

As far as the photo, are you saying that when you click on it (in edit mode) it does show it linking to the media file? Because if it does, then it would be strange for the click to not do anything. Every instance of that happening that I know of was because the link was set to “none”.

In fact, WordPress did me a wrong a few years ago when they switched to their new systems . . . all of the links to all the photos in my old posts were removed. I used to link to my SmugMug galleries, and in the older posts, all those links are gone.

Anyway, not a big deal; it would have been great to see a larger version of the photo but if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

Feel free to check any of my posts from the last however many years. Now, if you are saying the update only affected your stuff, well, I guess I can’t prove otherwise.

As for older posts? Yes, go back to 2012, and sometimes during that year they made a change that wiped out all the links from previous years (unless they were internal links – I used to link to the same photo in SmugMug).

But, we could go back and forth on this and get nowhere. Ultimately, if you say WordPress is messing with your links, I can’t argue it unless I look at your post. If you are not bothered by it, certainly I won’t be since it’s not my blog.

I’d be willing to bet that it doesn’t only affect my blog. I’ve been through this kind of shit before with WordPress. My older stuff is working, though. I do bet that if I wanted to take the time—and I don’t—I could find exactly when this problem happened and link it to a specific update. Also note that blogs like yours and mine might not get updated at the same time because it’s up to our host, not WordPress.

Normally I click reply at the actual comment on the post, but I clicked reply on the e-mail notice and it had the latter comment . . . which is the one I accidentally clicked and replied to. User error.